Every Seventh Student

By Diane D. Allensworth and Dianne L. Kerr

If you are a junior high or high school teacher, the health of your students is under attack from a deadly combination of ignorance and illness. One in seven of your students will contract a sexually transmitted disease by the time he or she is 20. Most of these infected adolescents will contract one or more of the relatively common STD's. But AIDS, the newest such disease, is also spreading with frightening speed among teenagers.

Most of your students know little about these diseases, and almost half say they have no one--peer or adult--they can turn to for advice and help. Teachers and schools must do much, much more to combat the ignorance and isolation that help spread STD's. In order to protect the physical and emotional health of our young people, the silence about these diseases must end.

Grim statistics show that the spread of STD's among teenagers is epidemic. Each year, two and a half million teenagers contract one or more of the relatively common STD's: chlamydia, gonorrhea, genital herpes, syphilis, hepatitis, or genital warts. This high incidence of STD's is also an ominous warning sign for what could become an AIDS epidemic among teenagers. The Centers for Disease Control reports a 43 percent increase between July 1988 and July 1989 in the number of teenagers with AIDS. Although only 447 teenagers were actually diagnosed with AIDS as of the end of November 1989, many more are believed to be infected with HIV, the AIDS-causing virus. According to Karen Hein, director of the adolescent AIDS program at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, the rapid spread of the AIDS virus among heterosexuals that some health experts predicted is now occurring among teens...